TED2011: Dan Ariely Talks About the Biases We Don’t Recognize

The Health Blog has written a lot about conflicts of interest. At the TED2011 conference, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economics professor at Duke, talked about how hard it is to detect our own subtle biases.

Ariely, a burn victim, recounted how one of his doctors called him into the office and announced he was going to improve Ariely’s life. The doc was going to make Ariely’s face more symmetrical by tattooing little black marks on the side of this face that no longer had hair growth so it would look like the stubble on the other side.

The head of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (motto: “Research into what might have been”), Ariely was skeptical and asked many questions, including what would happen when he aged and his stubble became white. Ultimately, he decided not to go through with the procedure. Ariely said the doctor responded with a big guilt trip.

Puzzled about why his doctor cared so much, Ariely asked the doctor’s colleague and learned that his doctor needed him to be the third burn victim to undergo this procedure so the doctor could publish a paper on it, a conflict of interest that the doctor hadn’t disclosed.

But everyone is subject to this kind of bias. Later, Ariely was looking at some data from a study he was conducting and noticed a participant in one of the two groups yielded data that was unexpectedly poor. Ariely also noticed that participant was significantly older than others and also may have been drunk when the experiment was conducted.

Ariely was about to simply drop the individual as an outlying data point when he realized that if the man had been in the other group, the resulting data would have supported Ariely’s hypothesis. In that scenario, Ariely realized, he probably wouldn’t have been so quick to drop the subject as an outlier.

Realizing he had a bias — wanting his findings to appear a certain way — and a conflict of interest not unlike that of his doctor, Ariely decided to re-run the study.

Only by recognizing that we’re susceptible to conflicts of interest can we try to prevent them from happening, says Ariely.

Image: iStockphoto

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the institution where Ariely is a professor.

Comments (3 of 3)

I know I am operating with a bias when I feel an internal surge of energy about any single position. I assume that surge is my ego powering up for a challenge. And if my ego is involved, I am incapable of an unbiased examination of issues.

10:16 pm March 6, 2011

Bia is Everywhere wrote :

So now that we realize that bias is everywhere... lets get over it and look at everything objectively which is what we are supposed to do in the first place.